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The cultural formation of citizens and the hegemony of the ‘ethical state’ in England emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, a period when capitalist social relations were consolidating, operating through the processes of bourgeois institutional differentiation and the regulation of culture and social space from above. This paper employs the methods of historical ethnography to address the historical vertities of these cultural processes in colonial Ireland. It focuses on one institution—education—in one north of Ireland parish to explore how class and gender mediated the process and experience of the institutional separation of education in the second half of the nineteenth century. The rigid ‘culture of control’ orchestrating gender roles and material survival in working-class households framed distinctions in the attainment of schooled knowledges and created divergent uses and functions for such knowledge in the broader social context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]